Primary Source Information: Books in Print

National bestseller 2017 National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) Finalist ABA Indies Introduce Winter / Spring 2017 Selection Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Spring 2017 Selection ALA 2018 Notable Books Selection An intimate and poignant graphic novel portraying one family's journey from war-torn Vietnam, from debut author Thi Bui.   This beautifully illustrated and emotional story is an evocative memoir about the search for a better future and a longing for the past. Exploring the anguish of immigration and the lasting effects that displacement has on a child and her family, Bui documents the story of her family's daring escape after the fall of South Vietnam in the 1970s, and the difficulties they faced building new lives for themselves.   At the heart of Bui's story is a universal struggle: While adjusting to life as a first-time mother, she ultimately discovers what it means to be a parent--the endless sacrifices, the unnoticed gestures, and the depths of unspoken love. Despite how impossible it seems to take on the simultaneous roles of both parent and child, Bui pushes through. With haunting, poetic writing and breathtaking art, she examines the strength of family, the importance of identity, and the meaning of home.   In what Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen calls "a book to break your heart and heal it," The Best We Could Dobrings to life Thi Bui's journey of understanding, and provides inspiration to all of those who search for a better future while longing for a simpler past.

A true story of persecution, friendship, and ultimate triumph,Do They Hear You When You Crychronicles the struggles of two extraordinary women: Fauziya Kassindja, who fled her African homeland to escape female genital mutilation only to be locked up in American prisons for sixteen months; and Layli Miller Bashir, a driven young law student who fought for Fauziya's freedom. Fauziya Kassindja's harrowing story begins in Togo, Africa, where she enjoyed a sheltered childhood, shielded by her progressive father from the tribal practice of polygamy and genital mutilation. But when her father died in 1993, Fauziya's life changed dramatically. At age seventeen Fauziya was forced to marry a man she barely knew who already had three wives, and prepare for the tribal ritual of female genital mutilation--a practice that is performed without painkillers or antibiotics. But hours before the ritual was to take place, Fauziya's sister helped her escape to Germany, and from there she traveled to the United States seeking asylum--and freedom. Instead, she was stripped, shackled, and locked up in various INS detention facilities for sixteen months. Enter Layli Miller Bashir, a driven twenty-three-year-old law student who took on Fauziya's case. When the two women met, Layli found an emotionally broken, emaciated girl with whom she forged an extraordinary friendship. Putting her heart and soul into Fauziya's case, Layli enlisted help from the American University International Human Rights Clinic. The clinic's acting director, Karen Musalo, an expert in refugee law, devoted her own considerable efforts to the case, and assembled a team to fight with her on Fauziya's behalf. Ultimately, in a landmark decision that has given hope to many seeking asylum on the grounds of gender-based persecution, Fauziya was granted asylum on June 13, 1996. Here, for the first time, is Fauziya's dramatic personal story, told in her own words, vividly detailing her life as a young woman in Togo and her nightmarish day-to-day existence in U.S. prisons. It is a story of faith and freedom, courage and inspiration--one that you will not soon forget.

During the spring of 1994, in a tiny country called Rwanda, some 800,000 people were hacked to death, one by one, by their neighbors in a gruesome civil war. Several years later, journalist Jean Hatzfeld traveled to Rwanda to interview ten participants in the killings, eliciting extraordinary testimony from these men about the genocide they perpetrated. As Susan Sontag wrote in the preface,Machete Season is a document that "everyone should read . . . [because making] the effort to understand what happened in Rwanda . . . is part of being a moral adult."

An NEA Big Read Selection "This is the best account of the Hmong experience I've ever read--powerful, heartbreaking, and unforgettable."--Anne Fadiman, author ofThe Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down "A narrative packed with the stuff of life." --Entertainment Weekly Kao Kalia Yang is the author ofThe Song Poet andThe Latehomecomer, which was a finalist for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award and the Asian American Literary Award, and received the 2009 Minnesota Book Award.

The story of the refugee camp in Thailand where the Hmong survivors gathered.

An English PEN Award-winning collection of personal testimony from participants in the Arab Spring   As revolution swept through the Arab world in spring of 2011, much of the writing that reached the West came via analysts and academics, experts and expats. We heard about Facebook posts and tweeted calls to action, but what was missing was testimony from on-the-ground participants--which is precisely what Layla Al-Zubaidi and Matthew Cassel have brought together in Diaries of an Unfinished Revolution. These essays and profoundly moving, often harrowing, firsthand accounts span the region from Tunisia to Syria and include contributors ranging from student activists to seasoned journalists--half of whom are women. This unique collection explores just how deeply politics can be held within the personal and highlights the power of writing in a time of revolution.

Millions of undocumented immigrants live in the United States under constant threat of imprisonment or deportation. They survive underground, with little protection from exploitation by human smugglers, employers, or law enforcement. Underground America presents the remarkable oral histories of men and women struggling to carve out a life in the United States. Among the narrators: Farid, an Iranian-American business owner who employs a number of American citizens while he himself remains undocumented. A critic of the Iranian government, he fears for his safety if he is deported to his native country. Diana, who along with thousands of other Latino workers helped rebuild the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina. After completing her work, she and many others were detained and imprisoned for not having proper documentation. Liso, who was enticed to come to the United States as a religious missionary, but on arrival was forced into unpaid domestic labor.

New York Times Notable Book New York Times Bestseller What Is the What is the epic novel based on the life of Valentino Achak Deng who, along with thousands of other children --the so-called Lost Boys--was forced to leave his village in Sudan at the age of seven and trek hundreds of miles by foot, pursued by militias, government bombers, and wild animals, crossing the deserts of three countries to find freedom. When he finally is resettled in the United States, he finds a life full of promise, but also heartache and myriad new challenges. Moving, suspenseful, and unexpectedly funny, What Is the What is an astonishing novel that illuminates the lives of millions through one extraordinary man.

An extraordinary work of oral history that illuminates the diverse ways in which the Chinese perceive and understand their own modern history.

Colors of the Mountain is a classic story of triumph over adversity, a memoir of a boyhood full of spunk, mischief, and love, and a welcome introduction to an amazing young writer. Da Chen was born in 1962, in the Year of Great Starvation. Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution engulfed millions of Chinese citizens, and the Red Guard enforced Mao's brutal communist regime. Chen’s family belonged to the despised landlord class, and his father and grandfather were routinely beaten and sent to labor camps, the family of eight left without a breadwinner. Despite this background of poverty and danger, and Da Chen grows up to be resilient, tough, and funny, learning how to defend himself and how to work toward his future. By the final pages, when his says his last goodbyes to his father and boards the bus to Beijing to attend college, Da Chen has become a hopeful man astonishing in his resilience and cheerful strength.

Immaculee Ilibagiza grew up in a country she loved, surrounded by a family she cherished. But in 1994 her idyllic world was ripped apart as Rwanda descended into a bloody genocide. Immaculee's family was brutally murdered during a killing spree that lasted three months and claimed the lives of nearly a million Rwandans.Incredibly, Immaculee survived the slaughter. For 91 days, she and seven other women huddled silently together in the cramped bathroom of a local pastor while hundreds of machete-wielding killers hunted for them. It was during those endless hours of unspeakable terror that Immaculee discovered the power of prayer, eventually shedding her fear of death and forging a profound and lasting relationship with God. She emerged from her bathroom hideout having discovered the meaning of truly unconditional love--a love so strong she was able seek out and forgive her family's killers.The triumphant story of this remarkable young woman's journey through the darkness of genocide will inspire anyone whose life has been touched by fear, suffering, and loss.

They had been massacred, assassinated. The death squad] had pulled off their nails. They had been burned with acid ... shot in the head. In a provoking, first-person account of the horrors of war and political persecution, Salvadoran refugee and community leader Carlos Vaquerano remembers the day that his brother Marcial and seven others were brutally murdered by the death squads supported by his country's violent right-wing government. When a sister in the United States offers to help him emigrate, Carlos and his family agree that he has no other options. So, like the more than one million Central American refugees fleeing the atrocities of war, Carlos makes the difficult journey through Mexico and into the U.S. Once here, though, he cannot forget his brother's admonishment: Never forget that you have to fight so that justice exists in our country. Fulfilling his brother's plea, Carlos Vaquerano would go on to establish the Salvadoran-American Leadership and Educational Fund, one of the nation's leading Central American organizations. Each of the eight people interviewed for this landmark collection--Carmen Alegria, Isabel Beltran, Juan Ramon Cardona, Eduardo Gonzalez, Javier Huete, Alicia Mendoza, Rossana Perez, and Carlos Vaquerano--is a leader in the Salvadoran/Central American refugee movement. Consequently, this book offers insight into the early philosophy and framework of the movement as revealed by some of its pioneers. Published as part of the Hispanic Civil Rights Series, this compelling and historically significant volume collects the personal narratives of Central American refugees who fled the violence in their homelands and became leading community advocates at theforefront of social justice.

Finding Mañanais a vibrant, moving memoir of one family's life in Cuba and their wrenching departure. Mirta Ojito was born in Havana and raised there until the unprecedented events of the Mariel boatlift brought her to Miami, one teenager among more than a hundred thousand fellow refugees. Now a reporter for The New York Times, Ojito goes back to reckon with her past and to find the people who set this exodus in motion and brought her to her new home. She tells their stories and hers in superb and poignant detail-chronicling both individual lives and a major historical event. Growing up, Ojito was eager to excel and fit in, but her parents'-and eventually her own-incomplete devotion to the revolution held her back. As a schoolgirl, she yearned to join Castro's Young Pioneers, but as a teenager in the 1970s, when she understood the darker side of the Cuban revolution and learned more about life in el norte from relatives living abroad, she began to wonder if she and her parents would be safer and happier elsewhere. By the time Castro announced that he was opening Cuba's borders for those who wanted to leave, she was ready to go; her parents were more than ready: They had been waiting for this opportunity since they married, twenty years before. Finding Mañanagives us Ojito's own story, with all of the determination and intelligence-and the will to confront darkness-that carried her through the boatlift and made her a prizewinning journalist. Putting her reporting skills to work on the events closest to her heart, she finds the boatlift's key players twenty-five years later, from the exiles who negotiated with Castro to the Vietnam vet on whose boat, Mañana, she finally crossed the treacherous Florida Strait. Finding Mañanais the engrossing and enduring story of a family caught in the midst of the tumultuous politics of the twentieth century. On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Mariel boatlift, a Pulitzer Prize winner's extraordinary memoir of her childhood in Cuba and her historic journey to America

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Downexplores the clash between a small county hospital in California and a refugee family from Laos over the care of Lia Lee, a Hmong child diagnosed with severe epilepsy. Lia's parents and her doctors both wanted what was best for Lia, but the lack of understanding between them led to tragedy. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest, and the Salon Book Award, Anne Fadiman's compassionate account of this cultural impasse is literary journalism at its finest. ______ Lia Lee 1982-2012 Lia Lee died on August 31, 2012. She was thirty years old and had been in a vegetative state since the age of four. Until the day of her death, her family cared for her lovingly at home.